Preface -- List of abbreviations -- Chapter One: Introduction -- 1. Theoretical motivation -- 2. Why re-study the development of do? -- 3. Theories and data -- 4. Heterogeneity of explanatory dimensions -- 5. Structure of presentation -- Chapter Two: Do up to the fifteenth century -- 1. Phases of do development -- 2. The origin of "meaningless periphrastic do" -- 3. Do in the Paston letters (1422-1509) -- 4. The democratization of do: a speculation -- Chapter Three: Do and discourse structure -- 1. Do as a marker of discourse-semantic prominence -- 2. Saliency and foregrounding -- 3. Foreground and contrastiveness -- 4. Local foreground structure markers -- Chapter Four: Syntax and style in the sixteenth century -- 1. Do in the sixteenth century: the quantitative problem -- 2. Standard and prose style -- 3. Main stylistic currents -- 4. Relevant stylistic structures -- 5. Imitating Latin syntax -- 6. Antithesis -- Chapter Five: The semantics of do in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- 1. Analysis of a pamphlet (1521) -- 2. Authority -- 3. Rhetoric and foreground -- 4. Rhetorical questions -- 5. Negation -- 6. Intensity -- 7. Performatives, speech act verbs, and verbs of perception -- 8. Logical relationships -- 9. Standardization and synonyms -- Chapter Six: Unity and diversity: style, dialect and the semantics of do before 1600 -- 1. Use and semantics -- 2. Syntactic versus semantic explanation -- 3. Do as a marker of courtly speech -- 4. Do in low texts -- 5. The demise of courtly do -- 6. A case study: Early American letters -- 7. Semantic, stylistic and dialectal diversity, and German tun -- 8. Methodological considerations -- Chapter Seven: Do in the Shakespeare corpus -- 1. An initial hypothesis -- 1.1. The problem -- 1.2. The phonotactics and frequency of thou + st -- 1.3. Methodological advantages of the Shakespeare corpus.

2. Subcategorizations and terminological conventions -- 3. Phonotactics and periphrasis frequency -- 3.1. Differences between person and tense categories -- 3.2. Differences between phonetically defined types of verb stems in the present -- 3.3. Differences between syntactic contexts in the present -- 3.4. Generalization in the present from thou + you -- 4. Diachronic interpretation of the synchronic pattern -- 4.1. Analysis of the preterite and diachronic interpretation of the subcategorical pattern -- 4.2. Stability of the variational pattern -- 5. Further strategies of avoiding (d)st -- 6. Negatives -- Chapter Eight: Do in questions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the statistical evidence -- 1. Methodological considerations -- 2. Corpora analyzed -- 3. From raw data to indices: an example -- 4. Periphrasis frequency in questions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the evidence -- Chapter Nine: The mechanics of generalization -- 1. Individual utterance versus system -- 2. Naturalness and isolect -- 3. Micro-structure of generalization I -- 4. Rhetorical and other questions -- 5. Micro-structure of generalization II -- 6. Frequency and residuals -- 7. Poetic uses -- Chapter Ten: Third singular morphology and syntax -- 1. Inflectional ending and verbal syntax -- 2. The transition from th to s -- 3. The phonotactic factor -- 4. Parallels between third singular and do development -- Chapter Eleven: Subjunctive -- 1. Overview and purpose -- 2. Historical development of subjunctive marking -- 3. The structure of subjunctive marking in Early Modern English -- 4. The inflectional motivation of subjunctive marking -- 5. Do in subjunctives -- Chapter Twelve: Wh-questions -- 1. Motivations for analyzing wh-questions -- 2. Empirical data -- 3. Results -- 4. Interpretation -- 5. Dimensions of directionality.

Chapter Thirteen: Natural and social aspects -- 1. The semantic unity of do uses -- 1.1. The rise of epistemic do -- 1.2. Do in negation -- 1.3. Exclamatives -- 1.4. Emphatic do -- 1.5. Typology and grammaticalization -- 1.6. Semantics of do and inversion -- 1.7. Further word-order factors -- 2. Natural tendencies -- 2.1. Motivations for naturalness -- 2.2. Natural tendencies in the development of do -- 3. Semantic directionality: subjectivization -- 4. Social and varietal aspects -- 4.1. Do and written standard -- 4.2. The diversity of do meanings -- 4.3. Order and grammar -- 4.4. Medium and meanings of do -- 4.5.The unfashionableness of thou -- Conclusion -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index.